Liathach ridge in the Scottish Highlands, the setting for Graeme Macrae Burnet’s His Bloody Project.
Photograph: Murdo Macleod for the Guardian

Crime writing turned up in unexpected places this year. The usually mystery-sniffy Man Booker prize shortlist found a place for Graeme Macrae Burnet’s His Bloody Project (Contraband), a smart amalgam of legal thriller and literary game that reads as if Umberto Eco has been resurrected in the 19th-century Scottish Highlands. Ian McEwan also blurred genre boundaries in Nutshell (Jonathan Cape), an ingenious rewrite of Hamlet as a murder story in which a foetus is both detective and possible victim.

The crime reader’s dream of a long, labyrinthine novel that you never want to finish is magnificently fulfilled by Six Four by Hideo Yokoyama (Riverrun). This Japanese super-seller, translated by Jonathan Lloyd-Davies, is a police-procedural conspiracy thriller involving two disappearances that also rivetingly dramatises the mindsets and lifestyles of contemporary Japan.

Among more familiar practitioners, The Trespasser (Hodder & Stoughton), the sixth in the Dublin Murder Squad sequence by Tana French, will introduce new readers to a phenomenal crime writer. Readers of her first five will be thrilled to go deeper and darker into the mind of Detective Antoinette Conway, the co-star of French’s previous best, The Secret Place, as she investigates an apparently simple murder case while questioning personal and professional beliefs. After publishing new adventures for Sherlock Holmes and James Bond, Anthony Horowitz returns to original work with Magpie Murders (Orion), a lovely puzzle in which a writer of sleepy English sleuth stuff may have buried nastier scenes from real life in his latest manuscript.

Although busy as a TV showrunner (Fargo, Legion), Noah Hawley has thankfully found time to continue his suspense fiction career with Before the Fall (Hodder & Stoughton), which, like its predecessor, The Good Father, uses a family catastrophe – in this case, a private plane ditching in the sea – to explore wider US tensions: a plotline involving a political campaign manager eerily previews Donald Trump’s triumph.

A writer popularised by TV, Ann Cleeves, confirms that she is the best living evoker of landscape, with Cold Earth (Macmillan), the seventh book in her Shetland series, in which a landslide reveals crime. The Woman in Cabin 10 by Ruth Ware (Harvill Secker), meanwhile, channels Agatha Christie’s murders at sea in a satisfying contemporary direction as a travel journalist doubts what she has seen on a cruise.

There were noteworthy crime debuts from Sanjida Kay, whose Bone by Bone (Corvus) turns unnervingly on how far a mother should go to protect her child, and Susie Steiner. Her Missing, Presumed (Borough Press) starts with the sudden disappearance of a woman whose loved ones may have an intriguing variety of reasons to mislead the police.

On the eve of Hull becoming UK City of Culture in 2017, the local tourist board probably won’t thank David Mark for Dead Pretty (Mulholland), his fifth crime novel set in the city, where savage extremes of wealth and poverty are the background to killings. A former reporter, Mark brings rare insight into urban undercurrents.

Disappearances in Susie Steiner’s Missing, Presumed. Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian

Several old lags defied the relentless book-a-year pressure of the market to remain fresh and inventive a long way down the shelf. Taking a breather from his DI Tom Thorne novels, Mark Billingham finds a clever and affecting twist on the classic “closed circle” crime story with Die of Shame (Little, Brown): when a member of a rehab support group is murdered, police are left to interrogate fellow addicts, who keep secrets and tell lies with ease. Val McDermid reaches the landmark of 30 published novels with Out of Bounds (Little, Brown), in which a car crash reopens an old crime. It’s a showcase for McDermid’s deft plotting and psychological canniness.

Some of the longest-running police series still energetically walked their beat in 2016. Peter’s Robinson’s 23rd DCI Banks novel, When the Music’s Over (Hodder & Stoughton), bravely entwines two controversial storylines: one is about a Savile-like sex criminal; the other tells of an Asian gang alleged to be grooming girls. Although Ian Rankin is clearly struggling to find ways of re‑employing the retired John Rebus, the 21st in the series, Rather Be the Devil (Orion), thoughtfully explores the strange co-dependent relationship between the cop and his longstanding rival, aging gangster “Big Ger” Cafferty. Similarly, Love You Dead (Macmillan), the 12th Peter James novel about DCI Roy Grace, expands the backstory of the detective’s missing wife with compelling results.

James’s book features a so-called “black widow” killer – a woman whose lovers come to suspicious ends – and this metaphor seems to have gone viral among writers this year. It provides plotline and title for Chris Brookmyre’s Black Widow (Little, Brown), featuring his appealing-appalling journo-hero Jack Parlabane, and dealing with the internet’s effect on reputation. In The Black Widow (HarperCollins), Daniel Silva, an increasingly impressive Washington-based novelist, dramatises an Islamist attack on Paris. Silva wrote most of the book before the Bataclan attacks, yet in its account of how such events might be thwarted, the story still feels ahead of the game.

The potential impact on cities of terrorism has understandably become a key theme of recent thrillers. The possibility of a global holy war underlies Conclave (Hutchinson), in which Robert Harris saves the Vatican thriller from the grip of Dan Brown. In contrast, Crisis (Bantam), an enjoyable and informative debut by BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner, looks more broadly at western insecurities.

Any of the above titles, if given as a gift, would leave the recipient more inclined to kiss than to kill you. However, those seeking a present that is seasonal in content as well as intent are well served by a British example of a tinsel-mystery subgenre that is more common in the US. Murder Under the Christmas Tree (Profile) collects late-December tales from practitioners late (Conan Doyle, Christie) and living (Rankin, McDermid). And The Mistletoe Murder and Other Stories (Faber) is a box of crackers from PD James, a writer still viscerally missed by her readers.

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